I gave Bartender a try after a few recommendations here and had problems with full-screen applications while it was running. That plus a general lack of polish mean I can't keep it running for any extended period of time, no matter how nice and clean it makes my menu bar... oh well.

The only issue I have had with Bartender is with the "MailTab for Gmail". If you configure it to only show in Bartender and only show update for x amount of seconds when a change occurs, the menu item will show each time it seems it is polling for new mail, not when new mail arrives as I was expecting. Not a deal breaker and probably nothing Bartender can properly handle anyway. The only other nice feature would be if you could control certain menu items to display within Bartender or the Menu bar based on being on battery or ac power - IE place the battery status menu item in bartender while charging but when on battery display the menu item normally.

Thanks to the recommendation here I'm trying out BarTender, and it is awesomesauce. It looks much nicer.

The only menu icon that will not go into the bartender bar or be hidden is Microsoft SkyDrive, which is a regrettable piece of software on the Mac. It has been trying to sync 381 kb for at least 6 hours, too.

Sparrow seems to act a little funky with it, too, showing up every time it checks mail rather than when it actually receives mail. Ideally, there'd be a way for me to set Bartender to show Sparrow only when new mail arrives and the menubar icon lights up blue, and then *keep* it in the menubar until all mail has been read. But, hey, whatevs. I'll take it like it is. Being able to hide everything is awesome.

Much <3 for Bartender as mentioned above, it's a whole new world! I love that it'll show the active ones for 5sec when they have something to say and ignore them the rest of the time. And I LOVE being rid of Notification Center and Spotlight.